Associate Professor Nadia Yaqub has published a volume co-edited with the late Rula Quawas, Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017).
Bad Girls of the Arab World is an interdisciplinary collection of writings by and about Arab women that focus on Arab women’s often-fraught engagement with the boundaries that shape their lives. The book addresses the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. They include short pieces in which women reflect on their experiences with transgression; academic articles about performance, representation, activism, history, and social conditions; an artistic intervention; and afterwords by acclaimed novelists Laila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy. The book demonstrates that women’s transgression is both an agent and a symptom of change, a site of both resistance and repression. Showing how transnational forces such as media discourses, mobility and confinement, globalization, and neoliberalism, as well as the legacy of colonialism, shape women’s badness, Bad Girls of the Arab World offers a rich portrait of women’s varied experiences at the boundaries of propriety in the twenty-first century.